[Perception in space. Visual aspects of space perception]

Abstract

The ability to apprehend and appropriate space is based on a series of perceptive and cognitive processes, in which vision plays a leading part. Preliminary, elementary operations first allow a subject to achieve the elaboration of a visually structured percept. Both experiences on healthy subjects, and pathological data have provided evidence for a right hemisphere superiority in tasks such as localization of stimuli and discrimination of line orientation. Depth perception rests both on indirect cues (e.g. relative size of objects, perspective and movement parallax) and on two types of specific stereoscopic processes: the so-called local and global stereoscopies, which depend respectively on the integrity of visual cortices and of inferior occipito-temporal areas (with a right-hemisphere dominance). Movement perception is integrated at the level of area V5, at the lateral occipito-temporal junction on both sides. The accuracy of reaching movements and displacements within space require the elaboration of a system of coordinates in which the position of the egocentric reference will then be taken into account. This is achieved by successive coding of eye and head position relative to the body axis, and by building the body reference from proprioceptive and vestibular afferences to the parietal cortex. Finally, attention must be both diffusely scattered throughout the whole space and voluntarily allocated as needed on a given object. Simultanagnosia and unilateral spatial neglect (USN) are examples of disruption of these attentional processes. Simultanagnosia illustrates the loss of the ability to shift attention from one point to another, but both shrinking of the attentional field and poorly sustained fixation are also possible mechanisms of this syndrome. USN probably has several components. Unilateral brain damage causes interhemispheric attentional imbalance that explains the attentional preference for the ipsilesional side of space. The predominance of neglect following right-sided lesions might be the consequence of hemispheric specialization regarding directed attention, with the left hemisphere preferentially allocating attention to objects and the right one being able to attend to the whole space. The anatomical basis of such a functional differentiation is still unclear.